Who's Responsible for Women Wanting to Be So Thin?

I believe that more than anything, it is women pressuring other women to be thin (however, I would love to hear someone argue this). Men inherently are not attracted to size 0 girls. They are biologically 'designed' to be attracted to women with a few more curves, as they suggest health and fertility - as I learned in my social psych class. This is not to say men have no part in creating the ideal that women ought to be beautiful. If we look at it a little more, it is predominantly women and homosexual men that would in the fashion industry, who the skinniest women work for, and where average girls are trained to associate beauty with being rail thin. Woman are also the ones asking where other women got their cute clothes and how they got so thin - further enabling thinness to consume women. In order to change the ideal of being stick thin, we must change the woman's perception of what it means to be beautiful. Health is beauty.

Reponse to Ed

What does it mean to learn?

This blog related to the end of my last entry. Learning can mean different things to different people depending on the way with which they learn. For example, I learn very well artistically and also by teaching myself. I teach myself to play piano, take photographs, and draw. A huge reason I learn best by myself is, because of my debilitating disease ADD, I can only focus on and thus learn about something I am very, very interested in. Unfortunately, only I can know what truly interests me. So thus, what, why, and how I learn means what do I find interesting and how do I educate myself.
There is of course learning through classes and learning for objective reasons, but learning to me is knowing how to do what is important to me. I feel I did not explicate myself well and this is probably a horrible blog....

Response to Shelby

Shelby asked a question regarding why we blame ourselves for not understanding something rather than the text/speaker

I think this typically occurs in situations where we are not particularly knowledgeable about a certain subject and the person or text teaching us is claimed to be a knowledgeable source on the topic. Then we are put into a position where if we decide to argue the validity of something, we ask ourselves, 'where do I get off?" We assume the source we are leaning from possesses more insight than we do, and so we are in no position to contest them - this is not to say I discourage such conduct. There is a marvelous quote by Eugene Deb that, "Intelligent discontent is the mainspring of civilization." By all means, challenge the authority.
But there are certainly instances where I do not buy what I'm learning in class and fight the urge to speak out vehemently, because when I do I get shut down. Sometimes, the misunderstanding does not come from either the disciple or the teacher. Everyone learns differently - and this is fact. Some are visual learners, some are not. Thus, the problem lies in the conflict between teaching style and learning mechanism.

Reponse to Joel

Where are there examples of people being taught to avoid pleasurable things or activities?
A huge reason that you may see this is drugs. Obviously, people can become addicted to drugs because it rewards the dopaminergic pathway and thus creates a pleasurable feeling (often).
Simultaneously, drugs are a very dangerous substance in many cases, and can destroy lives (in both the literal and figurative sense), and so people who are addicted need be weaned off of it for future benefits.
Also, sex is a very pleasurable activity. However, Christian ideals persist that we must abstain temporarily until after marriage, even though you may be an adult capable of giving consent. There is still a law that should you be caught engaging in premarital sex, you may be arrested and even jailed - although it is not often enforced.
Where are there examples of people being taught to seek out unpleasurable activities?

I had been keeping all of my blogs in a notebook which I would write just before I went to bed, and haven't found the time to put it on the internet because my computer has been in and out of commission. However, I wrote a blog about my high school and saw recently that Michelle Webb had posted a question regarding what possible alternatives to grading there was, and I talk about this a little in the blog I wrote prior to.
I came from a charter school where we didn't have grades or tests, so as you can imagine, adjusting to college (especially when I am used to 60 people in the entire senior class) was awkward. My high school's catch phrase was that public schools prepare you for college but Parker (my school) prepares you for life. I absolutely agree with this. How do we benefit from being graded = and more over, being ranked! What good can come from ranking? For those that score high, they will encounter unimaginable pressure to maintain such a status and those that rank low will lose any and all self-esteem. My roommate was in a bad mood the other day because she's nervous that she will not graduate with a high enough GPA. A GPA should not be a reflection of your intelligence. I would never want my intelligence represented by a mere number. For this I get frustrated. It feels silly to me that the only reason I work so hard on projects is to see a number hopefully close to 100. This should not be our motivation. In my high school we always had the ability to revise our work and LEARN from our mistakes!! This is absolutely imperative to learning.
My question has already been stated several times, but how do we benefit from grades and class ranks?

I recently watched a special on the discovery channel regarding Stephen Hawking's ideas of whether time travel is possible. He comes to conclude that time travel into the past is NOT possible. This is because time travel into the past would create a paradox. The example he gives is that if we were to build a gun and then use that gun to shoot ourselves when we were building the fun, it wouldn't make any sense. However, Hawking ventures to say that time travel to the future IS possible. If we can speed atoms to near the speed of light, than we can truly time travel. This discussion of time travel has got me thinking about earlier in the semester when we talked about time. If we were to time travel, would it prove or disprove that time exists?

I recently parsed the phenomenon of being able to 'feel' someone watching you, and now I would like to debunk the idea that once you learn about something, it happens and appears in front of you more and more. For example, my roommate recently did aproject on Bosnia and Herzegovina and now she sees it in the news everywhere. Much like when you acquire a new word into your vocabulary, you come across the word very frequently. Again, I believe this is not a true phenomenon. Once we have acquired a new extravagant word to our vocabulary, we are more likely to be consciously aware that we have encountered that word. When we encounter the word soon after we have learned its meaning, we will need to remind ourselves what the meaning is, and also likely feel rewarded for knowing it. You will see that over time, we will no longer pay much attention to the individual word as we no longer need to stop and remind ourselves of the meaning and no longer feel the need to reward ourselves for knowing it, and the word will dissipate into our regular vocabulary.

What other phenomenons can you debunk?